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Engineers create value - making them more efficient at their work generally creates more opportunity for work.

Lawyers are an unfortunate necessity that extract value from society. Making them more efficient at their work (hopefully) creates less opportunity for work.

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I disagree with these generalizations.

You could just as easily say that engineers work to exploit and otherwise harm people, and lawyers work to protect people from exploitation and other harm.

This type of attitude displays a common blind spot of many engineers. Manipulating human social systems to achieve a specific result is harder, and at the end of the day probably more important than manipulating computer systems. Software engineers have a tendency to think "well if only everyone would just act exactly so and so none of this would be a problem! So it's obviously everyone elses fault for acting wrongly.", and they refuse to accept that politics, law, sales, management, and all the rest are completely 100% necessary and that not a single complex dynamic human interactive system is ever going to just do whatever they think it should do as a matter of moral obviousness.

This seems tangential? Engineering and law aren't the only exemplars of these categories, there are lots of fields where the marginal problems to solve are interesting verses uninteresting, they were just contrasting the two in the article. For example, more productive artists usually leads to more experimentation and weirder artwork; more doctors usually leads to more specialization and advanced knowledge; more VC money for crypto projects usually leads to more Ponzi schemes; etc, etc

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